Knowledge Transfer through Sustainable Design

Standard functional designs with standard documentation packages, which every utility maintains for their PAC applications, serve as a platform for knowledge management. Current utility practice is codified in these standards; engineers and others must learn and apply these standards. A sustainable design process improves on standards packages in two ways: (1) it establishes the standards as the central knowledge management tool by clearly defining the philosophy for PAC applications, and (2) it drives an active process of periodically reviewing the overall system design and application to incorporate ongoing experience of the organization along with advances in technology.

The philosophy document of a sustainable design captures the wisdom and experience of the entire PAC organization from engineers to technicians to operators. For each PAC application, subject matter experts (SMEs) take input from others in the utility, and codify this input into the philosophy, and the resulting functional designs and standard documentation packages.

The philosophy document should capture the PAC team’s thinking on applications – why a specific application is used, when to choose one protection application over another, the justifications and criteria for this philosophy, and the history of this application and sustainable design. In other words, it documents the logic behind the choice of protection schemes for everyone in the PAC organization to understand. This document should also describe and justify protection settings criteria used in standard applications, and the limitations to those criteria.

The other key part of sustainable design is the process for managing and updating design standards. This process mandates knowledge transfer, as SMEs must actively solicit feedback from all users of a design, must integrate needed changes to a design, and document these latest changes (and the reasoning behind them) in the PAC philosophy. In this way, all members of the PAC team learn during the design process, and this feedback also starts to develop the next group of SMEs to take over designs and standards.

Sustainable design easily extends to account for emerging technologies such as digital substations, virtualization, and IBR impacts. Following the sustainable design process inherently grows the utility knowledge base to cover these new needs and starts creating new

SMEs.